I’m celebrating! This photo may not look like much but you are looking at the brackets for the brake master cylinders on the pilot’s side of my Bede BD-4C permanently attached to the plane. It has been a long time since I put something on “to stay.” Click to see a larger version and join […]

Light airplane brakes are hydraulic, like car brakes, but they are arranged a little bit differently. There are four rudder pedals in most airplanes, two for the pilot and two for the copilot. To move the rudder, you push on a pedal. To activate a brake, you push on the top of a pedal, tilting […]

Making shims for my Bede BD-4C makes me want to sing, Shim shiminey Shim shiminey Shim shim sher-ee! A sweep is as lucky As lucky can be but I will spare your ears and forgo the podcasting. The brackets for the brake master cylinders will sit on top of a couple of different pieces of […]

I mounted the rudder pedal tubes in my Bede BD-4C tonight and, hooray!, this set is made right and fits correctly. Here is a picture of one of the old (made wrong) tubes. You are looking at the pedal which will be under the pilot’s right foot. The rudder pedal tube should be aligned directly over the […]

It has been a long month of virtually no progress on my Bede BD-4C. When last I wrote, I had spent a week working on rudder pedals, guides for rudder cables, and the bell crank for the rudder at the rear of the fuselage. That was way back on March 18. After that, I tried […]

I spent the whole week working on various aspects of the rudder pedals and controls for my Bede BD-4C. I cut the steel rudder pedal posts to fit the rudder pedals, drilled the tabs on the backs of the pedals to accommodate the hinge pins, Alodined and painted a few parts, drilled the fuselage for […]

I spent a lot of the last week spray painting parts for my Bede BD-4C. I painted the steel parts which attach the axles to the main gear legs. I painted brackets, bell cranks, and push-pull tubes for the aileron controls. I painted the eight brackets for the aileron cable pulleys. My mini-spray paint booth […]

I found a way to spray paint small parts inside my garage without getting overspray onto everything in sight. That makes me very very happy because I had been very very worried that I would make a huge mess inside and it is too cold to paint outside. I built a miniature spray paint booth […]

At long last, I am beginning to assemble some of the myriad small parts that I have made for my Bede BD-4C. Please accept my apologies for the lapse between postings. Life has conspired to keep me largely away from the BD-4C project. First, I was waiting for the rudder pedals to arrive from BedeCorp. […]

As promised, here are photos of the intricate woodwork in the otherwise aluminum Bede BD-4C. 🙂 There is a 7′ long aluminum tube which runs through the fuselage to activate the horizontal stabilator. The ends of this push-pull tube have aluminum clad hardwood inserted into them. I cut the wood roughly to shape. The .063″ […]

I had been avoiding making the VS-16 spacer for the top of the rudder of my Bede BD-4C airplane for weeks. Everything else that I have made to date has been out of aluminum. This was the first part made out of 4130 alloy steel. I knew that this was a very hard steel and […]

Tonight I made a pair of brackets which will hold two of the pulleys for activating the ailerons on my Bede BD-4C. These brackets are made from .063″ thick aluminum, which is two to three times thicker than anything I have had to bend before. As the metal gets thicker, it is more likely to […]

I have spent the last two weekends making a whole slew of brackets for the Bede BD-4C. That means that I have been turning 2″x2″x0.063″ aluminum angle extrusions like this into airplane parts. (Click on any of the pictures below to see larger versions.) “Turning into” means that I start with a two dimensional drawing […]

How I spent my winter vacation: Since I had the week between Christmas and New Years off work, it gave me a long stretch of time to attack the large job of installing the floor in my Bede BD-4C. I thought it would be simple but, in the end, I was very glad that I had […]

I have finished the rudder of my Bede BD-4C! Well, almost finished the rudder. It still needs the counterbalance on the top and the weldment on the bottom. And it needs to actually be riveted together. But, other than those trivialities, the rudder is done. The two skins are trimmed to size. The piano hinge […]

I have designed and fabricated my first parts from scratch! As I mentioned in Starting on the Rudder, I needed to design new, smaller ribs for my Bede BD-4C rudder. I did and they fit. 🙂 Click the photo to jump to the on-line gallery where you can see larger pictures.  

I started on the rudder of my Bede BD-4C, again. A week or so ago, I had built two of the ribs that go inside the rudder, the VS-9 rib for the bottom and the VS-10 rib for the middle. These two were made out of 0.025″ aluminum but I could not make the top […]

I had all five pieces of tail cone for my Bede BD-4C cut out but I had not been able to drill the screw holes in the top. The TC-2 (top piece) fits over the skins. That would have been just fine except the skins came pre-fabricated from BedeCorp, including having the screw holes pre-drilled. […]